When Hal and Eileen left the stadium it was in accordance with a
prearranged plan to meet Ina and Kitten and two of the boys who had
contrived the loan of a touring car for the evening. They would drive
to Olive Hill for the celebration--the exciting part of it. Competitive
drilling, not in gaudy uniforms, but that more useful drilling that had
to do with ledges of shale and limestone. It was at best but a poor
imitation of the annual drill contest in the gold mining country, where
powerful muscles contended with steel bitted drills against the tough
impediment of granite. Here the very ledge had to be faked--removed
from the nearby hillside with infinite care, and mounted against an
improvised wall of mine refuse. It was the best the coal mines of
Illinois could afford, but it served its purpose. There were money
prizes and lesser trophies--geese, chickens and baskets of provisions.
The contest finished, there was a dance in the pavilion. Hal had parked
his roadster where he and Eileen could watch the antics of the dancers.
He was not sorry when he learned that the borrowed car must be returned
by midnight, and the others must be on their way towards Springdale. He
and Eileen would be following in a little while, he said.
“I’ve been trying all evening to dodge them,” he added, as he waved
farewell to the departing car. “Some people simply can’t take a hint.”
The girl nestled close. “Just you and me ... all alone in the universe.”
“Sweetheart,” Hal slipped his arm around her waist and laid his cheek
against hers, “it’s all fixed with my father. He’s set on having me go
to Pratt; but he’s agreed on an allowance that ought to take care of
two. We’re in luck that you can cook. And you won’t mind a little flat?
I can count on Adelaide to help us out if we get in a pinch. Of course
my mother’ll raise Cain--and I’ll be on the lookout for a job, from the
start. If they think I’m going to wait all that time for you--why, I
can’t, Eileen!”
The girl’s breath came so thick, it choked her. The dancers swam
dizzily before her eyes. The saplings in the little grove took up the
dance, swaying with uncertain rhythm, their lithe trunks bending to the
tumult in her brain. “Do you love me well enough to get along that way
for a year or two? Will you come to me, sweetheart, when I send for
you?”
And then the rain. Men and women went scurrying to places of shelter.
The thin grove, the pavilion with its dilapidated roof, the mine
house--whose inner spaces were always barred to the public as soon as
the last workman had gone--these offered meagre protection. Over there
behind the mine dump was a corn crib and feed room where provender for
the now obsolete pit mules had formerly been kept. No one else had
thought of this refuge. Hal and Eileen were alone, the rain pounding on
the rusty tin roof to the tune of their madly beating hearts.
V
How long Judith lay asleep she did not know. She was aroused at length
by voices, so close that they seemed to emanate from the lawn beneath
her window. She tried to move. Her arm, her neck, her shoulder creaked
with pain. She must have been there in that cramped position a long
time. Her hair and her thin negligée were quite damp. As her scattered
senses collected themselves she realized that the sound came from
beyond the wall. A voice, hoarse with rapture, Eileen’s voice, murmured
over and over:
“Oh, darling, I never knew I loved you until now.”
Some high platitude touching manly fidelity punctuated the girl’s
impassioned utterance. The façade of the house lay in ghostly shadows
that enveloped the figures completely. But out there across the lawn
lay the white moonlight, frosting the wet grass with a shimmering
incrustation of unearthly jewels. Hal Marksley’s substantial form came
like a skulking wraith from the gloom, gliding along the thin edge of
the shadow until he reached a convenient screen of shrubs, vaulted over
the wall and crossed close beneath Judith’s casement. He was cranking
the reluctant engine of his motor car, out there in the side street, as
the clock in the chapel tower struck three.